Quicker Than You Think...

 Merry Christmas.  

In my 60 years celebrating Christmases with my first family and the family I made with my wife, there are so many memories and a fair number of regrets.  I do not think that you reach this age and manage not to have a single regret - though if you do, I expect it's not a very well-examined life.  But your life is yours, mine is mine.  And I can look back and see where I did things wrong or poorly, and I can see some successes, as well.  

But I will tell you that my first 25 or so, before I was with my wife, were both memorable and challenging.  For many reasons.  

My mother told me some years before she died that she well-remembered the first Christmas in the house which I remember as my first "home".  I was 11 years old when we moved from the house in Kutzman's Addition (they named it, I didn't) to the house my Grandmother had lived in along the river.  Those first years are filled with memories of getting up very early and seeing the fully decorated tree.  It wasn't decorated at all when I went to bed.  It was fully decorated the morning I got up - and being the eldest of five, I was usually the ring leader.  

Along about the age of nine or so I had somehow managed to be selected to read what my family considers "The Linus Story" at Christmas Eve Midnight mass.  This is the beginning of the Gospel of Luke.  The Gospel, typically the third reading at the Catholic Sunday, and Holy Day, masses, is always read by the Priest who presides over the Mass.  Why I was reading it on Christmas Eve, I do not recall.  I don't remember if there was any sort of competition or any sort of process which I went through.  I do know that I had to read that thing several times, and for many years, I'd had it memorized.

Not all of that came from just reading the Bible, though.  Due to my extended family history, anything having to do with Peanuts was a big deal.  And it wasn't just my family that pointed out that with the many Christmas specials that would appear on television every year, there were only two that tended to focus on the actual reason for the event, and only one, not The Little Drummer Boy, but The Charlie Brown Christmas, which told the Gospel Story and displayed, right there, with commercials, the faith of Charles Schulz and the true reason for the season.  The birth of Christ.

And it was that year which I was told that well, there was a fair amount of work that was done for Christmas I was unaware of.  As my father put it, "We help Santa Claus by decorating the tree and putting the gifts underneath it."  So yeah, that's when things started.  And it was suddenly obvious why we were not able to go downstairs and play in the basement those weeks BEFORE Christmas AFTER the school let us out - we were stuck upstairs, all day, very little time outdoors, because presents were hidden downstairs.  Well, duh, I guess so, yep.

Then we moved into the river house, and it was about two years before I took over getting the tree into the house.  Which, as I got older became a much larger endeavor.  My mother did figure out it made a whole lot of sense to wrap the tree, in the driveway, with a couple of older sheets.  It pulled them much closer to the trunk, making the tree narrower, which was in theory a way to make it easier to get it up stairs.  I had three steps outside to hit the front door, which was 36" wide, then up six steps into the living room.  Where I had help getting it into the tree stand.  Which my father engineered and had his brother-in-law build at a real blacksmith shop, where he basically just took a length of 10" diameter steel pipe, weld a plate across the bottom to make it water tight, with a spike in the middle to pierce the base of the tree, and three equidistant threaded holes that accepted three bolts which had been bent to make them easier to turn to grab the trunk.  The three legs sticking about 4" out from the side of the pipe, also equidistant, were initially attached to a 4' x 4' chunk of 3/4" plywood.  Which worked until the tree got to be the full 9 1/2' of the vaulted ceiling, and we - my father and I - ended up engineering a solution.  I suggested we start by rounding off the original base, and then adding a second layer of plywood below to use better fasteners to the top layer - which we would reinforce by adding the circle removed from the bottom onto the top, giving a gap below where we could put bolts through the bottom and tighten the nuts on top.  Then the "outriggers" - four foot long four-by-eight rough-cut pine beams which came off the bottom of book pallets at my father's publishing house workplace (pallets build for holding books are much more substantial than others - these had 1 1/2" thick boards attached to three of these massive beams, upright, which held large stacks of books and other printed materials).

Then I had my own family.  With just my wife and I for the first three Christmases, and our little artificial tree for us and our cats, I found another way to wire the tree to the wall to keep it from falling over when the cats would climb it.  Then into our house, eventually, and ... well, then we can start with regrets.  

Which you don't need to hear.  But today, with my son and his wife celebrating their first married Christmas with her family, together for only the second time since the wedding, and enjoying everyone - my son and their kitten, our "grandkitty" - all getting along with their cats and dogs.  And we're here with our two dogs, and my daughter came over this afternoon.  And we had a nice afternoon Christmas Eve with food and movies and I think everyone had a pretty good Christmas.

But it sure seems that the time I got to have with my kids went by awfully fast.  Those Christmas Memories and photos with my parents, my wife's mother, and our own at home Christmas - they went past too fast.  We had very early on decided on a four year rotation for Christmas.  One year at home, one year at my parents, one year at home, one year at her mother's.  We mostly stuck to that rotation while everyone was alive, but now that they're all gone, it seems like that there really wasn't that many Christmases.  

So enjoy and savor the time.  It's very quick.  And wonderful.